Where Heaven Touched Earth

Spiritual Life, Winter 2003 by Collins, Julie A

WHENEVER I TRAVEL, I ALWAYS FEEL much more secure if I can get advice beforehand from a friend who has visited the same region. This is partly because I am "directionally challenged" and anything that will help me get around more easily in a strange city is reassuring. This also minimizes the "I am wasting valuable time" feeling that washes over me when I get lost on the subway and take two hours to find the Metropolitan and not the expected twenty minutes. So before my trip to Spain, I sat down with a Jesuit friend to chat about my upcoming visits to St. Teresa's hometown, Avila, and St. Ignatius's castle in the Basque country. After some practical advice, he said to me:

Promise you will pray for me in two places. In the Monastery of the Incarnation there is the stairway where Teresa of Avila said she saw a small boy who asked her, "Who are you?" "Teresa of Jesus," she told him. She then returned the question: "And who are you?" The Child answered, "I am Jesus of Teresa."1 And then, in Loyola Castle they have restored Ignatius' bedroom where he recovered from his wounds and first began to pray. Remember me there. I think both places are where heaven touched earth.

"Where heaven touched earth." I have been thinking about this phrase for several days, and as I gaze in stunned gratitude out my retreat center window onto the dome of the Basilica of St. Ignatius Loyola, which towers over the village of Azpeitia, the words continue to reverberate. What does that mean, "Where heaven touched earth"? Why, how does this happen? Why are Avila, Loyola, Lourdes, Assisi, Iona, and Jerusalem, places of spiritual power? Why do we gravitate toward them, century after century, age after age? What makes them sacred, priceless? As believers, they are not just museum pieces, not just places of memory like Monticello or Gettysburg or Versailles. In each of these sacred places, we pilgrims come because we feel that where God has been, God still is. We travel to these places for healing, forgiveness, and strength. We come to these places because we believe, frankly, that where God transformed one human life, God can do the same for me.

Sacred Places

Now at a certain level this can seem almost pagan in its theology, right up there with the animist's worship of the sacred waterfall or mountain. Intellectually, I know that God can be as powerfully present to me in my condo in Rockville, Maryland, as he can in the room where the wounded Ignatius read, prayed, and said his world-changing "Yes." God is, of course, everywhere and, more importantly, God is endlessly gracious and eager to hear me. And so traveling three-thousand miles is not a requirement for my own conversion.

Clearly, then, travel or pilgrimage is not a necessary condition for God to love me and change my life. God places no such conditions on divine mercy. But sacred places can have a tremendous impact on me because they put flesh and blood and bone around God's embrace, since God is ever respectful of my freedom, always waiting to be invited. Sometimes the depth of God's touch is dependent on what I can allow, what I can believe. Before we can believe, often we have to imagine, and what we can imagine for ourselves often begins with analogy, often begins with another person's experience. Thus, the lives of the saints and the life of Jesus are of incalculable value. As I meditate on the life of Jesus, as I study the lives of the saints, I can begin to wonder (as, in fact, St. Ignatius did during his recovery from the now-famous cannonball), "Could this be me? Could I do what these great men and women did? Is it possible that God could pursue me the same way?"

Just as importantly, when we visit the homes of the saints, we touch their humanity and, in a sense, their ordinariness. At the Monastery of the Incarnation you can see Teresa's well-worn sandal and remember the hundreds of miles she traveled, establishing her reformed monasteries all over Spain. In Ignatius's restored rooms in Rome, visitors can see where the Saint spent the last fifteen years of his life. You can sit and pray in the room where he died. In one of his outer rooms, the curators have placed a bronze copy of his death mask on a pedestal, which puts Ignatius' face at his actual height.

When I visited the room, there were two young Latin American Jesuits who were having a good time getting their pictures taken next to it. After they left, I tentatively stepped up to the death mask and burst out laughing when I realized that Ignatius was just slightly taller than my own stately 5' 2'' frame. A towering mystic he may have been, but my favorite knight from Loyola was not Lancelot tall.

In Avila there is a painting of St. Teresa, completed during her sixty-second year. From all eyewitness accounts, Teresa was a stunning woman until the day she died. Actually, even after she died. She is one our "incorruptibles" and was disinterred several years after her death-still fragrant, peaceful, and lovely. Anyway, when the ever-honest Teresa was shown this portrait, she turned to the artist and said, "God forgive you, Fray Juan. You have made me look like a bleary-eyed old hag!" Any woman who has ever kept her thumb over her driver's license picture while handing it to a sales clerk can certainly identify.